Facebook, which is
supposed to be one of the most dynamic companies in the world, was
deeply sexist and stuck in a 1950s mentality that was a cross between a
frat house and 'Mad Men' until recently, a new book by a former senior
staff member has claimed.
Katherine Losse, who worked for Facebook
between 2005 and 2010, claims that female workers at the social network
were propositioned for threesomes or given crude insults like 'I want
to put my teeth in your ass' in 'The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart
of the Social Network'.
Lower ranking employees, who were
invariably female, were treated like "second class help" and banned from
a conference unless they worked as coat checkers whilst there.
Meanwhile in between toga parties and late night 'hackathons', male
engineers raced skateboards around desks as if they were in the X Games.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckberg has been compared to Napoleon and branded a 'little emperor' who created a company where his staff could 'idol worship' him.
On his 22nd birthday female workers were even asked to wear a T-shirt with his face on it in his honour.
Losse was employee number 51 and worked her way up from customer
relations to a senior marketing role before becoming the speechwriter
for Zuckerberg.
At its core, she claims that Facebook is all
about creating a 'popular techno frat that didn't exist at Stanford or
Harvard' where men can engage in endless competition with each other.
"The older men in the office could be unbridled in their wide ranging
desires for sex and attention as the youngest ones," the Daily mail
quoted her as writing.
"One of the few married engineers on the
team was known by his female colleagues (after he had made several
unwelcome propositions to them) to invite lower ranking women at the
company to have threesomes with him...
"...When a female
employee reported being told by a male co-worker in the lunch line that
her backside looked tasty - "I want to put my teeth in your ass" was
what the co-worker said - Mark asked (it was hard to tell whether it was
with faux or genuine naivete): 'What does that even mean?" she wrote.
During an away trip to Las Vegas
a group of Facebook engineers filmed themselves inviting girls up to
their table in a club then shouting "Leave, you're not pretty enough!"
when they didn't like them.
The 2007 'F8' conference in San Francisco
was open only technical employees but Facebook relented on everyone
else - so long as they carried out coat checking duties whilst there.
This meant lower paid employees who were invariably female were treated like 'second class help', Losse writes.
The year before Facebook had offered its staff a $1,000 a month subsidy
to live within a mile of the office in the belief that it would make
them happier.
But until there was an outcry this was only offered to engineers on $80,000 a year salaries.
Customer service workers, which included the few women who worked for
the company, were told they could not have it even though they were on
just $30,000 a year.
"The company's entire human resources
architecture was constructed on the reactionary model of an office from
the 1950s in which men with so-called masculine qualities (being
technical, breaking things, moving fast) was idealised as brilliant and
visionary whilst everyone else (particularly the nontechnical employees
on the customer support team who were mostly female and sometime, unlike
the white and Asian engineering team, black) were assumed to be duller,
incapable of quick and intelligent thought. It was like Mad Men but real and happening the current moment, as if in repudiation of fifty years of social progress...," Losse wrote.
"...Facebook it seemed wanted to have it all: to be the new and scrappy
kid on the block and have the feel of an old boys' club that had been
around forever," she added.
It wasn't until the arrival of chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg in 2009 that things actually changed.
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